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Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

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Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#371

Post by Intermernet »

yashap wrote: post #175

Nice to see Cloudflare fighting the good fight, but patent trolls aren’t the only issue with software patents. A major issue that people talk about way less is well funded/large companies getting bullshit patents, and using them to sue their small startup competitors into the ground. It doesn’t even matter if they win - when a company with billions in the bank sues a company with millions in the bank, the small compa…

If companies are found to have filed bad faith patents, there should be a rapidly escalating cost increase for future patents, ending in penalties including their existing patents being legally released into the public domain.

There is, of course, the usual problems of companies spinning up shell companies to mitigate the risk, but that's a different problem that needs fixing for a whole bunch of reasons.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#372

Post by EnigmaFlare »

thelastgallon wrote: post #247
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But property usually isn't taxed. Trading is. If you license a patent to someone else for $500/year, you'd pay tax on that $500. But if it's actually worth more, of course you wouldn't charge such a low fee.

Property is almost always taxed. In Texas, property taxes on homes are 2.5 - 3% of value, most people pay between 8K - 30K every year. And this keeps going up! Over a 30 year mortgage, I'm sure most people pay more on property taxes than on their home. Approximately 50% of property taxes go to school districts, the rest for other municipal services. Some states also tax car as property. What is not taxed is Intellect…

Real property is an exception but we're talking about other kinds of property. I don't know of any other kind that's commonly taxed.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#373

Post by shiroiushi »

bhaney wrote: post #370
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two important differences. 1 Patent trolls are non practicing entities, ie they don’t produce anything other than lawsuits(pure rent seeking), big companies may not be producing on all of their patents, but they typically provide at least some societal value. 2 big companies aren’t typically making direct revenue from their patents, but rather use them as a moat to prevent challengers (which seems more simi…

> Patent trolls are non practicing entities That's not a part of any commonly accepted definition of "patent troll" that I'm aware of, but of course NPEs can also be patent trolls. > use them as a moat to prevent challengers This is what makes one a patent troll.

>That's not a part of any commonly accepted definition of "patent troll" that I'm aware of

It's exactly the definition I've heard of for the past 20+ years.

>This is what makes one a patent troll.

No, it isn't.

Think about what a troll does: it hides under a publicly-owned bridge, and then forces anyone who wants to cross the bridge to pay a toll.

This is exactly what the NPEs do with their BS patents: they get a patent on some obvious BS, and then charge people money to use "their IP".

Big companies don't do this: they use patents to prevent competitors from operating. They don't grant licenses to their competitors at all. Trolls in mythology didn't refuse bridge access to anyone, they just forced them to pay a toll.

The entire point of being an NPE is to get money from licensing (and lawsuits).

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#374

Post by shortsunblack »

If a patent officer denies a patent, the patentee can resubmit the patent. Then by procedure other patent officer needs to review the application. They do this ad infinitum until they get their patent granted. It's a denial of service attack. The service here being "skilled employees" and the denial being "we annoyed the organization into submission". This is how most ridiculous, say Red Digital Camera's, patents get granted.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#375

Post by shiroiushi »

chefandy wrote: post #314
mike_hock wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple solution: Abolish patents. All the rhetoric about incentivizing innovation is bullshit. They stifle innovation, and they stifle competition. They're designed to protect slow, inefficient established corporations. That's all they ever did and that's all they'll ever do.

I reckon simple solutions are often simple because they ignore important complexities. I'd love to abolish patents, but I don't see how our society could before figuring out stuff like how else to support the people that do important knowledge work, and incentivizing creating new things when it's a hell of a lot more profitable to just wait until someone else does it first. The software industry is already compatible…

Have you actually read any patents? Just knowing the bare basics of how something works isn't enough to make a successful business out of it. Even with mechanical manufactured stuff, a few diagrams isn't going to tell you all the stuff you really need to know to properly manufacture it, and patents have famously left out lots of important trade secrets, not to mention stuff that people just didn't bother writing down.

>into complex chip design

Do you have any idea all the technology and tools that go into chip design? They aren't all nicely documented in some patent applications.

>when your competitor could just pay your lead engineer half of your 9 figure R&D budget to completely replicate the process

Good luck with that. No single engineer knows enough to replicate any truly complex process.

>I'd love if this work could be done by universities or publicly funded because it so obviously benefits the greater good

If you could pay a single engineer to do anything so substantial as you claim, then all this work would be done by universities. It isn't, for a reason.

The incentive that companies have to pour resources into this stuff is to make money, and they do this by building their technology base and market share. Not having patents isn't going to make much difference; it'll just prevent them from keeping new competitors out of the market so easily.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#376

Post by shortsunblack »

phpisthebest wrote: post #113
thelastgallon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents are property and we need taxes/fee on it. $500/year per patent, will ensure use it (if you think it is valuable) or lose it. This is no different from domain names, most people pay $10 - $100/year just to keep a domain name. Some domain names are used, most aren't. These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense.

>>These taxes can fund free education or healthcare or defense. is it is always a bad idea to ear mark a tax for a specific purpose. Especially if you desire to use the tax as a punitive measure to reduce that which you deem bad for society, if it works now you need to come up with the money for the thing you funded elsewhere because all government programs are permanent Look at smoking, all kind of things were funde…

Using tax to punish or reward is called correcting externalities. More formally these taxes are called Pigovian taxes and they are supported by economists from all the schools, in similar vein to a land-value tax, because Pigovian taxes do not hamper economic producitivity.

You seem to misunderstand the entire concept of taxation, in its entirety, also. Taxes can either be used to raise revenue, or to correct for externalities. A tax that corrects an externality is valid on its own, EVEN IF, the revenue from that tax is burned or otherwise destroyed. It corrects for market failure, which leads to greater surplus.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#377

Post by shortsunblack »

riazrizvi wrote: post #280
duped wrote: post #31

There needs to be a "use it or lose it" doctrine/law around technological IP. I get all the arguments around creating a market for the patent rights, but it just leads to these bottom feeders creating no value and increasing costs for the industry and consumers.

While appealing to me as an entrepreneur, if I step back, I don't see how this law could work. Patent Law is the regulation of intellectual property, as such, the way property is regulated, informs the way intellectual property should be regulated. Would it be possible to pass a law that says you can't own a patch of land unless you develop it sufficiently for some public utility? You can't own it unless you build a…

Intellectual property is not property. It's a misnomer. Property is inherently scarce and exclusive. IP is not exclusive. If I have an idea, and you have an idea, and we share those ideas -- we both have two ideas. What IP is, is an economic rent, a protectionist measure to a class of individuals. It's a tax on the productive economy and it reduces competition and thus inflates prices. It is enforced by the monopoly of violence that the state holds. The burden of proof for justifying this violence for this end is on the proponents, not the opponents.

>You can't own it unless you build a house on it, or an office? What about all the rough land, that isn't close to a development yet, but is anticipated to be? If someone can tell me how a law like this has been shown to work, perhaps even in a limited case like densely populated zones, then I might be persuaded.

And as for this, we already have this. It's called a land value tax. A tax that discourages unproductive land use.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#378

Post by Angostura »

rakoo wrote: post #94
Angostura wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No invention ever came out of nowhere, based on nothing more than hard work and selfless involvement Straw man. No-one has suggested that the inventor invented something in a complete vacuum without support from society.

And yet that's exactly what the patent model claims: The invention is the fruit of a single mind who must get the entirety of money ever produced by the commercialization of the product. It is a glorification of individualism

Clearly not. At the trite level, you can have a patent with multiple authors. But more generally, many patents are small incremental improvements on existing device. In this case, the patent only covers that incremental improvements. Overly broad claims in patents tend to lead to them getting invalidated.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#379

Post by shiroiushi »

beefield wrote: post #245
kstrauser wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I offer as an alternative: IP is property, and it's taxed at the value you declare that it's worth. However, if you swear to the IRS that it's worth $500/yr, then you can't claim in court that a violation of it is costing you $10,000,000/yr in losses. That would be perjury. Your patent is worth $10,000,000? Awesome! I bet your local school district will love to hear how much you'll be paying in taxes on it.

I offer one more alternative. Double the tax every year, and once the ip holder decides not to pay the tax, IP is released to public domain. No compnay has money to keep IP indefinitely in such a scheme.

I've proposed this alternative on message forums like this for probably 20 years now, but specifically for copyright. I think it'd be a great way to let Disney and co. have the long copyright terms they want for extremely valuable properties, but get other stuff into the public domain much, much faster.

Instead of doubling every year, my proposal is 5-year terms: the first is free, then $1000 for the next 5, $10k for the next 5, $100k for the next 5, etc. Feel free to adjust the actual dollar amounts, but you get the idea. Most stuff would be in the public domain after 10 years, if not 5.

Re: Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial

#380

Post by baobabKoodaa »

AlbertCory wrote: post #255
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ask your local candidates for Congress if they'll support removing patentability for software. That's how you solve this problem. That's not how any of this works. You don't think some people have already "asked their local candidates for Congress" about this? Surely you have personally done that? If you have, then how come the problem still exists? Clearly your action of "asking your local candidate for Congress"…

> You don't think some people have already "asked their local candidates for Congress" about this? Actually, no, I don't think they have. Judging by the lack of ANY bills in Congress, even bills that get shitcanned by the leadership -- no, no one has. I was going to quote the rest of your post, but it's all ignorant. I know how the lobbying in Congress goes; I personally helped hire one of Google's DC political repre…

You seemed to have entirely missed my point so I'll just reiterate it with different words: simple actions that one person can choose to do - such as sending letters, calling representatives, or signing online petitions - have no effect. None whatsoever. The world is exactly the same place if I take action, compared to if I take no action.

You claim that an ordinary person, such as myself, could affect real change by "calling my representative" or something silly like that. No, I can't.

> it's a sustained struggle

Sure. This I can agree with. The changing-things part, not so much.

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